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A study found that the excess mortality in the second and third year of the pandemic was higher than in 2020. The increase correlates with the start of the vaccination campaign. But experts think that’s misleading.
“Explosive study on excess mortality in Germany” – is the title of the online portal “Report24”, popular with the “lateral thinker” movement, at the beginning of June. According to this, a study by the mathematician Matthias Reitzner from the University of Osnabrück together with the psychologist Christof Kuhbandner from the University of Regensburg shows that the number of deaths in direct temporal relation to the corona vaccination campaign “exploded”. Stillbirths have also increased “rapidly”. In the “Axis of Goodness,” one author writes that the vaccination campaign is the only factor that could explain excess mortality.
Individual passages and graphics of the study are shared in various conspiracy channels on Telegram and serve as supposed evidence of the danger of the corona vaccines. However, from the point of view of experts, this conclusion from the study results is wrong for several reasons.
More people died in 2022 than in previous years
The fact that excess mortality was higher in many months in 2021 and 2022 than in the first year of the pandemic, 2020, is nothing new. Excess mortality means that more people die than would have been expected based on statistical calculations. The Federal Statistical Office (Destatis) has reported the excess mortality for the individual weeks and months since the corona pandemic, so that by the end of 2022 it was already clear how the excess mortality had developed during the course of the pandemic.
However, Destatis does not produce any excess mortality statistics for whole years, but does produce the death figures. According to this, a total of 985,572 people died in 2020 – about five percent more than in the pre-pandemic year 2019. In 2021 it was about four percent more: 1.02 million. And the preliminary figures for 2022 again show an increase to 1.06 million – four percent more than in the previous year and almost 13 percent more than in 2019.
However, an increase in deaths is not to be equated with excess mortality, since, for example, an increasing proportion of older people in the population is expected to lead to an increase in deaths.
According to Destatis, however, died in the first two years of the pandemic about 70,000 to 100,000 people more than expected would have been. Destatis figures are not yet available for 2022. However, the excess mortality in individual months was more than 20 percent above the median of previous years, which Destatis uses as a comparative value when calculating excess mortality.
What is the median?
The median is the value that is right in the middle of a data series sorted by size. It is also called the central value because there is as much data below it as above it. It has the advantage that the influence of individual extreme outliers on a statistic is reduced. The median should not be confused with the arithmetic mean, which is simply the average of all data.
Methodical part “carefully thought out”
For their study, Kuhbandner and Reitzner calculated the percentage of excess mortality for the years 2020 to 2022 for individual age groups, based on the deaths to be expected without a pandemic using the method of the German Actuary Association (DAV) and Destatis. The result: While there was no real excess mortality in 2020 (+0.41 percent), around 34,000 more people died than expected in 2021 and as many as 66,000 in 2022. The high excess mortality is mainly due to an increase in deaths in the age groups between 15 and 79 years.
The methodological part of the study has been carefully thought through and explained from the point of view of Giacomo De Nicola and Göran Kauermann, doctoral students and professors of statistics at the University of Munich. The two only consider the development of deaths based on the DAV data to be wrong. This will primarily affect the year 2022, where the number of expected deaths should have been higher, which is why excess mortality for 2022 is overestimated. As a result, the percentage of excess mortality in individual age groups is questionable.
Using their own model, Kauermann and De Nicola came to the conclusion that although there was higher excess mortality in 2022 than in previous years, it was still within the natural range of fluctuation – with the caveat that their approach could somewhat underestimate excess mortality . For the year 2020 Like Kuhbandner and Reitzner, they come to a minimal excess mortality of 6317 deaths (+1 percent), for 2021 to 23,399 unexpected deaths (+2.3 percent).
Correlation with vaccination campaign
However, the main criticism of the interpretation of the study is different: Kuhbandner and Reitzner put forward the hypothesis that due to the higher vaccination rate in 2021 and 2022, excess mortality should actually have decreased. Instead, they use temporal correlation to show a possible connection between the number of vaccinations and excess mortality. Or as “Report24” summarizes it: “The number of deaths exploded in direct temporal relation to the vaccination campaigns.”
“What’s so attractive about this study is that it picks people up when there’s such an apparent contradiction,” says Jonas Schöley, a researcher in the Public Health Unit at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Rostock. “How can it be that the vaccination works, but the excess mortality is constantly increasing in Germany?” However, that is too short-sighted. “It is always suggested that the only difference between 2020, 2021 and 2022 would be vaccination. That is wrong.”
In the course of the pandemic, there were always new virus variants that were significantly more contagious and led to significantly more vaccination breakthroughs. The behavior of the population and the protective measures have also changed over the years, says Schöley. All of this together meant that the number of corona infections was significantly higher than in the first year of the pandemic: According to the Robert Koch Institute (RKI), 1.78 million cases were reported in 2020, 5.44 million the year after and a little more in 2022 than 30 million.
“There was a lot more cases of infection”
“When it comes to excess mortality, there are two things that matter: how many people are at risk and how big is the risk?” says Schöley. “For example, the risk of death has fallen for each individual case of infection due to the corona vaccinations, but there were significantly more cases of infection.” The number of infections is not taken into account in the study by Reitzner and Kuhbandner, only the number of reported corona deaths.
The two authors justify this with reference to a Statement of the German Statistics Working Group with the “lack of reliable data that could be used to validly estimate the course of the virus spread and the lethality of the respective virus variant in Germany”. Based on the figures reported by the RKI on the number of Covid infections, “no valid conclusions can be drawn about the course of the virus spread in the population” due to the lack of diagnostic quality standards.
Schöley also says that the data situation in Germany is bad in an international comparison, but it is, for example, through seroprevalence studies “Quite robustly” demonstrated that there were significantly more Covid infections in 2021 than in the previous year. In seroprevalence studies, a representative proportion of the population is examined for antibodies against the coronavirus in the blood.
Sebastian Klüsener, Research Director at the Federal Institute for Population Research (BiB), says that although there has always been an unreported number of corona infections, over time corona waves can be recognized quite clearly with the help of the infection numbers, since the number of positive tests increased significantly within a very short time.
Other research fields more suitable
According to Schöley, it is unlikely that the corona vaccination is responsible for the high excess mortality for several reasons. On the one hand, the coincidence in time of vaccinations administered and deaths could be explained primarily by the high rate of infection. “There was always particular pressure on the population to get vaccinated when the numbers were particularly high.” In the case of influenza waves, no connection would be made between influenza vaccination and deaths, despite the temporal correlation.
In addition, demographic research with a view to evaluating the benefit-risk factors of vaccinations is not very suitable. “Ultimately, these are only loose correlations,” says Schöley. In order to investigate the possible dangers of vaccination, studies are needed that compare, for example, the mortality rates of vaccinated cohorts with those of unvaccinated cohorts. Only such studies allowed causal conclusions. Klusener also points this out.
And these studies are clear from the point of view of the experts: According to studies, this is what vaccinated people have an up to 80 percent lower risk of death in the age up to 70 years compared to unvaccinated. Severe side effects of a corona vaccination, on the other hand, only occur in 0.4 out of 10,000 cases, deaths are even rarer (0.1 per 10,000 vaccine doses administered).
According to Schöley, the number of stillbirths is also not an indication of a possible risk of corona vaccinations. Because these have been increasing in Germany for years, the trend is therefore ongoing and not new, as an investigation shows.
Kuhbandner and Reitzner report that the conclusion that the vaccination campaign is the only possible factor for excess mortality “can definitely not be drawn from the study we published”. The question of the causes of excess mortality is not the focus of the study. However, the observation of a temporal connection between vaccination and unexpected deaths represents a risk signal that must be investigated in more detailed follow-up studies.
Possible explanations for excess mortality
While the excess mortality in individual months in 2020 and 2021, according to Klüsener and Schöley, can be attributed quite clearly to the corona deaths, the picture for 2022 is different. The cause of death statistics from Destatis, which will only be published towards the end of the year, will provide final certainty. However, the data from individual federal states, including populous ones such as Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg, are already available to the experts.
“The figures for Baden-Württemberg show that three times as many people died of Corona in October as in the previous month,” says Klüsener. In December, on the other hand, diseases of the respiratory system were recorded as the cause of death twice as often as in November – including influenza, for example. There was also a sharp increase in diseases of the circulatory system in December – from Klüsener’s point of view, this is also a possible indication of, for example, the consequences of a delayed flu.
“It turns out that the assumptions made by me and other experts last fall, which were based on data from the Robert Koch Institute on the number of corona and flu infections, are now being confirmed by the first data from the cause of death statistics,” says Klüsener. In addition to the corona pandemic, the flu is one of the defining factors for excess mortality in 2022.